MacArthur winner Sendhil Mullainathan uses the lens of behavioral economics to study a tricky set of social problems — those we know how to solve, but don’t. We know how to reduce child deaths due to diarrhea, how to prevent diabetes-related blindness and how to implement solar-cell technology … yet somehow, we don’t or can’t. Why?

Models and modeling are basic to human play. They are basic to a great many other human enterprises as well, for example, science (a diagram of a cell), architecture (model buildings), engineering (model bridges), art (the clay figure the sculptor makes before making the real statue), video and film (storyboards), writing (outlines), cooking (recipes), travel (maps), and many more.
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why are models and modeling important to learning?
Because while people learn from their interpreted experiences—as we have argued above—models and modeling allow specific aspects of experience to be interrogated and used for problem solving in ways that lead from concreteness to abstraction.[21]
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